Modifying self-praise in students' self-reflection journals

TRÁVNÍKOVÁ, Petra. Modifying self-praise in students' self-reflection journals. In 10th Symposium on Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics. 2022.

Basic information

• Original name: Modifying self-praise in students' self-reflection journals
• Authors: TRÁVNÍKOVÁ, Petra.
• Edition: 10th Symposium on Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics, 2022.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 60203 Linguistics
• Country of publisher: Spain
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• Organization unit: Language Centre
• Keywords in English: pragmatics; self-reflection; praise; politeness; redressive strategies
• Tags: International impact

Abstract

The paper deals with self-praise as a speech act through which people positively evaluate their own performance (Guo and Ren 2020), a face-enhancing act directed at the speaker (Dayter 2013). Recently, there has been a growing interest in this speech act, specifically in online contexts and particular cultures. An analysis conducted on a self-compiled corpus of 150 self-reflection journals written by students of Academic English has revealed that direct explicit self-praise is very rare, as direct self-praise represents a threat to the speaker’s face (not only) in the Czech culture and is regarded as boasting or bragging. Therefore, students positively evaluating their performance in the course express it via modified self-praise (e.g., they add a disclaimer, give the credit to somebody else or use self-denigration). Furthermore, students also tend to stress praise given to them by a third party. Finally, the analysis has proved that violating the Modesty Maxim is highly undesirable in the Czech context, which might lead to interesting pedagogical implications.